If only I could do a poll...

[shadowkat]

1. Okay, I can't do a poll, because no paid account, but I'm curious...how many people who watch Doctor Who see it as a kid's show? And do your kids, assuming you have any, watch it? I'm particularly interested in the non-Brits. Because it's apparently marketed as a kid's show in Great Britain. But it isn't here. (It's shown at 9 pm here on Saturday nights. Not exactly what I think of as the prime kid-viewing hour.)

2. What is everyone watching? Anything interesting?

3.Sense8 got cancelled. Is it worth watching now that it is cancelled? Or will it irritate me because it ended on a cliff-hanger? What else on Netflix, Amazon Prime is worth checking out?

So far Bosch, Sense8, and Iron Fist have been mentioned. Anyone seen the Woody Allen/Elaine Page series?

4. Has American Gods finished yet? I'm waiting to binge watch as a 7 day trial on Starz.

Comments

[ex_peasant441]

Well, I think I had better qualify my statement before other Brits come charging in and contradict me.

Firstly, it isn't acceptable in my class and social circle. It is possible there are other classes and social sub-groups out there where it is more acceptable. But in my social group I only admit I am a fan to my very closest friends and they treat me with tolerant scorn as a lovable eccentric.

Secondly, it is in fact a little more socially acceptable than it used to be say ten years ago. For example the other day there was a photo in the paper which was just captioned 'fans dressed in costume at the London Comic Convention'. It was admittedly in the position they usually reserve for pictures of exotic wildlife or bizarre weather phenomena, but that is still progress. Because a few years ago the only mention of fans would have been an article with a title like 'The Sub-Culture In The Basement' which would basically have been an intrepid reporter filing an anthropological report such as a Victorian explorer might have sent back about a newly discovered Amazonian tribe. About the same level of sexual prurience as well. And ten years before that nobody outside said basements knew fandom existed.

So I grew up in a respectable rural place and had no idea comics or fanfic or conventions or any of the rest of it existed. My obsessing was done entirely solo.

going to the UK for a Ph'd in Science Fiction Studies at the Center for Sci-Fi Studies in Cambridge
That is cool. Academia is different of course, they can study anything they like. Also Cambridge is part of a different country comprising London, Cambridge, Bristol and a small patch of Brighton - they have very little in common with the rest of us.

[cjlasky7]

It blows my mind that there is a reluctance to "out" yourself as a grownup sci-fi fan in certain segments of British society, when I have spent most of my adult life as a huge fan of BRITISH sci-fi.

Along with Doctor Who and its various spinoffs, I've devoured Red Dwarf, Blake's 7, the Quatermass trilogy, Douglas Adams, the novels of John Wyndham (The Midwich Cuckoos & Day of the Triffids), the movies based on those novels--not to mention Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's salute to Wyndham in World's End....

England is where you find the COOL SciFi!

[ex_peasant441]

Maybe the fact it isn't really socially acceptable plays into how we write it? Certainly things like the Doctor Who episode Love and Monsters come out of it. And part of why Red Dwarf is funny is that it is poking fun at space opera tropes because everyone watching knows that sci-fi is really about a bunch of messy inadequates without proper friends who end up trapped with one another by default. Red Dwarf is basically the audience looking at itself.

[shadowkat]

Red Dwarf = Big Bang Theory.

It's a stereotype though. In reality, most sci-fi fans I've met are pretty much like everyone else.

[ex_peasant441]

I like Big Bang Theory! But I watch it through the lens of having a father who is a scientist and fits pretty much all the clichés except the ones about being fannish. I guess that might be a generational thing.

most sci-fi fans I've met are pretty much like everyone else
Whereas for me they are very much a different tribe to my RL friends. Their outlook on pretty much everything is just different. This is part of why I don't always feel I fit in fandom.

[shadowkat]

I've been fortunate in that I've mixed with a wide variety of people and lived in various places throughout my lifetime. So, I've known people who don't like sci-fi or fantasy. My grandmother didn't. And various people I've met here and there. One friend only liked literary, and would enjoy the occasional film. And one book club I was in -- didn't like it at all, and tended to see everything from a religious perspective. There was another book club that I was in for a while that loved genre, sci-fi, fantasy, etc.

While an undergrad -- I was doing my thesis on Ulysses and Sound & the Fury, while the guy next to me was doing his on Dark Knight Returns, and various graphic novels and action comics, regarding the death of the superhero in the modern age. And one of my courses in college - - was contemporary science fiction, we read William Gibson's Neuromancer. It was a small private College in a small town in Colorado. Where I met people from small towns that loved comics and sci-fi.

But there were also people who preferred 19th Century literature and wouldn't read anything published after 1950.

I had to go online to discuss Buffy, because no one I knew watched or liked it. Most people prefer to discuss sports teams to television shows...it's easier, I think?

[shadowkat]

Oh, forgot....the guy who was doing his thesis on Dark Knight returns (batman), The Watchmen, and the death of the superhero in comics, looked like Spike. He had a black leather jacket, black boots, an earring in his ear, white blond curly hair...and a California accent. It was the 1980s, the Billy Idol look was in back then.

And my Aunt's boyfriend when I was a little kid, also looked like Spike, blond hair, earring, leather jacket...it was the 1970s, also in back then.

[ex_peasant441]

looked like Spike. He had a black leather jacket, black boots, an earring in his ear, white blond curly hair...and a California accent.

Ha ha.

Looking back it is easy to forget how different Spike was. I know there were a few precedents for modern vampires in things like The Lost Boys, but the basic default idea of a vampire was still velvet and long hair. So I find I am slightly disappointed to discover his look was a generic one. ;)

[shadowkat]

Whereas for me they are very much a different tribe to my RL friends. Their outlook on pretty much everything is just different. This is part of why I don't always feel I fit in fandom.

Feel much that way myself at times, for all I stated above, I admittedly know few people outside of the DW friends or online that are interested in this stuff.

And I live in NYC.

It's why I went online -- to find people who were like-minded that enjoyed the same off-beat stuff I did. But I've never gone to a con, or really participated in fandom to the degree most have. Wrote very little fanfic for example -- mostly meta.

[ex_peasant441]

But I've never gone to a con, or really participated in fandom to the degree most have. Wrote very little fanfic for example -- mostly meta.

The only cons I've been to were some of the very small UK ones. Never more than 20-30 people, most of whom I already knew online. They were fun, but after a few times the RL differences between us were too strident so I doubt I'll go back again.

[shadowkat]

I just despise crowds and that's what conventions pretty much are -- crowds of people.

[cjlasky7]

"Love and Monsters" was definitely about DW fandom, but I think that's a very specific case. I classify Red Dwarf in the same category as the Hitchhiker novels, i.e., cosmic-level absurdism.

Dave Lister isn't so much a nerd as a layabout, drifting without motivation or purpose. So whether he's hanging out in a pub with the rest of humanity's layabouts, or hanging out with Kryten, Cat and HoloRimmer 3 million years in the future, it's all pretty much the same: what's the point of it all? What do I do next?

At their best, the Grant/Naylor team shared Douglas Adams' rare gift of rendering the terrifying randomness and absurdity of the universe in a way that almost brightens your spirits as you slowly work your way toward the void. You Brits are good at that...

[ex_peasant441]

I classify Red Dwarf in the same category as the Hitchhiker novels, i.e., cosmic-level absurdism.
Ha ha, yes.

At their best, the Grant/Naylor team shared Douglas Adams' rare gift of rendering the terrifying randomness and absurdity of the universe in a way that almost brightens your spirits as you slowly work your way toward the void. You Brits are good at that...
It's because all the people who found the randomness and absurdity frustrating emigrated centuries ago. The modern native Brit is descended from a long line of people who didn't get up and go, either because they were doing very nicely or because they didn't give a toss.

[jesuswasbatman]

I suspect that Red Dwarf got made because BBC executives thought of it as a parody of how stupid and pathetic SF works and fans were, as opposed to Grant Naylor. This was the generation of BBC leadership that cancelled Doctor Who and hardly made any more SF or fantasy (apart from the odd technothriller or work of magic realism where the fantasy elements could easily be written off as imagination, coincidence, or delusion) until the 21st century, largely because they despised the genre.

[cjlasky7]

But the series' respect for classic SF (in the service of comedy, of course) is exactly why Red Dwarf worked, and why it's still going. (BBC America isn't showing the new eps over here. Are they any good?)

Finding the right mix of fantastical and funny while staying true to the characters is extremely difficult. Americans have tried to do sci-fi comedies for generations; Futurama and Galaxy Quest are probably the only watchable output.

[jesuswasbatman]

I watched the first few seasons of Red Dwarf but haven't seen the most recent ones.

[shadowkat]

Apparently, we're trying again, with Orvill by Seth McFarland, which is also a satire, homage to Star Trek.

We have managed it with novels, John Scalzi comes to mind.

[cjlasky7]

Don't know Scalzi. Gonna have to check him out.

Can't believe I forgot Rick and Morty! Very funny, but plunges deeper into existential terror than almost anything else in the subgenre.

Trailers for The Orville look promising, but Seth is notoriously hit or miss. We'll see.

[shadowkat]

I liked Scalzi's RedShirts and Vonnegurt's Slaughter-House Five better than Addams.

Read one right after the other this year.

[shadowkat]

Oh, Cultural snobbery exists in the US as well.

Mainstream (by the way the correct terminology is not normal, but mainstream) folks don't get certain things that are off the beaten track.

[ex_peasant441]

by the way the correct terminology is not normal, but mainstream

Ha ha. I will consider myself duly corrected :D